6 Things You Have To Know Before Seeing Guardians Of The Galaxy

Zoe Saldana is certainly no stranger to playing an alien. It was just a few years back that she strapped on a motion capture suit for director James Cameron and brought Neytiri to life in Avatar. Of course, the actress’ role as Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy is quite different, as she performs under loads of green prosthetic makeup instead of CGI. Knowing that she would have to undergo hours of treatments in the special effects department, Saldana had just one major request during the design process. Did she want to be scary? Did she want to be ugly? Quite the opposite – she wanted to be alluring to the core demographic that will make Guardians of the Galaxy a hit.

The actress sat down with us between takes on set – still wearing all of her full Gamora look – and right out the gate the actress admitted that this is the first character she really wanted to stress as being pretty.

"That’s usually a thing that I don’t think about with other characters that I play, but for some reason, because I was going to be green and I was going to be the lead girl, I just wanted teenage boys to find me attractive," Saldana said. "I don’t know why I was stressing this a lot, but I really was when we were testing… Everybody else was just like, ‘Contacts? Do we dye the hair? Wig no wig? What color hair? How long is it?’ I’m like, ‘Pretty. Teenage boys, please. We gotta get their vote.’"

Speaking candidly, she told us that getting older and spending a solid four months being green had her questioning if she was losing her sex appeal, but ultimately what it drove home for her was a changing perspective of what beauty actually is.

"It definitely moves you a bit, and you do kind of wobble going, ‘Okay, what is beautiful?’" Saldana said. "And then you start to find your character really appealing and very beautiful in how different she looks because you get used to it."